Cast concrete, dog skull, ornamental metal & stain
46" x 28" x 10"
$3,000

I cast this relief sculpture in white concrete, aiming for the feel of the folded drapery of carved Renaissance marble, with a praying woman at its center, her head shrouded in fabric rendered with the same intricate, carved-stone quality as the rest of the piece. She was cast from a life cast of my son, and she sits beneath a looming sky crossed by fighter jets, her surroundings adorned with ornamental motifs heavily influenced by Middle Eastern architecture and design. Above her hovers a cross assembled from ornamental bathtub legs, at center affixed with a dog skull fitted with embossed tin eyes—a strange, private iconography layered over the piece's more legible religious feeling.

The title comes from Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, a line I found unexpectedly precise for what I wanted to say: that the impulse toward prayer and religious conviction, however sincere, has just as often been the occasion for violence. This piece sits with that contradiction rather than resolving it—it's shaped, quietly, by the wars still unfolding in the Middle East, by the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, by the recent war between the U.S. and Iran, and by the older, harder truth that war fought over ideology never seems to go out of style. Even so, I didn't want the piece to be only an indictment. There's a shroud of hope folded into it, deliberately.